ERNEST DOWSON.—Mr. Arthur Symons’s Introduction to the reprinted _Poems and Prose_ of the late Ernest Dowson has all the characteristics of the age to which both he and Dowson belonged. It is delicately appreciative, and not lacking in good judgment. Mr. Symons says, for instance, that Dowson was small enough to be overwhelmed by experiences that would have been nourishing food to a great man. But the style and manner of passing judgment almost completely contradict the matter of the judgment itself, and leave us in doubt whether Mr. Symons is not judging against his judgment. Literary criticism does not need to be literature; least of all does it need to be belles-lettres. Yet Mr. Arthur Symons and his whole school seem to aim at precisely this effect, that of writing in the same style as the work criticised. Thus we find him saying of Dowson: “all the fever and turmoil and the unattained dreams of a life which had so much of the swift, disastrous, and suicidal impetus of genius”—words and phrases which might have been written by Dowson himself. They are apologiastic of the person when what we ask of criticism is judgment of the quality of the style, and in the unfortunate identification of genius with disaster and suicide they are almost an incentive to the little artists to trade on their neuroses. I do not know whether Mr. Symons knew Dowson personally; it is of no importance; but his bedside manner with ailing geniuses would have been anything but tonic. It is symptomatic of Dowson’s state of mind, though Mr. Symons misses the subtlety of it, that he was always repeating Poe’s line: “the viol, the violet, and the vine.” A special affection for labials and liquids is conclusive evidence of minority, not to say infantilism; and stylists with any ambition to excel, and to develop both themselves and their style, will be wise to watch their “v’s” and “m’s” and “l’s,” in fact, their labials and liquids generally. Dowson wallowed in liquids and labials to the end of his short life; his vocabulary never grew up, and I have no doubt that, had he been asked to quote his own best lines, he would have pointed, not to the notorious “Cynara,” which is sufficiently pretty-pretty, but to these lines, in which he came as near to Poe as originality permits:— Violets and leaves of vine For Love that lives a day. “One is essentially of the autumn,” he wrote of himself. But that is not true, for Dowson was not ripe, but (I say it of course with respect) rotten. He remained in the cradle sucking sensations long after he should have been out in the world creating sensations. Life never got beyond his lips.